A Garo Grammar

The Dialects of Garo and its Genetic Affiliations.

Garo is the language of most of the indigenous population of the Garo
Hills in the state of Assam, India, and of certain parts of the districts
bordering the Garo Hills. These people, the Garos as they are known to
everybody but themselves, constitute about 80 per cent of the 250,000 people
in the Garo Hills district, and there are about 50,000 in other districts of
Assam, as well, mostly in the nearby areas of Goalpara and Kamrup, and a
good many more in the adjoining Mymensing District of Bengal, which is
now in East Pakistan. The few Garos in more distant districts all migrated
from this area within the last few generations.

The language is one of a well defined sub-group known as 'Bodo' or
more recently 'Baric,' of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Most classifications of
these languages have followed the linguistic survey of India in which they
were considered as one group within the Assam-Burma branch of the Tibeto-
Burman sub-family of Sino-Tibetan. More recently, Schafer has suggested
that the 'Baric' languages (essentially the Linguistic Survey's 'Bodo' plus
a few obscure Naga languages) constitute a separate division co-ordinate with
the Tibetan, Burmese, and Sinitic divisions of this family of languages. 1
Whatever is finally decided by comparative linguists on this score, there is
little doubt that Garo along with the other Bodo languages is related eventually
to most of the other Assamese hill languages and to Tibetan and Burmese, and
it is presumably eventually related to Chinese as well. There is no doubt
also that the Bodo languages form a well-defined group linguistically, and only
slightly less assurance that those which are still spoken are the remnants of
what was once a very important, even the most important group of languages
in the plains of Assam.

With the possible exception of the rather obscure branch called 'Chutia',
the Bodo languages can be readily classified under three headings, Garo, Koch,
and Bodo proper. Bhattacharya and myself (1956) made the estimate that
two of the groups, Garo and Bodo proper separated from each other about two
thousand years ago. That is, two thousand years ago the ancestral languages
of the Garos and the Bodos were the same. I believe that the third division,
Koch, branched off from the ancestor of Garo and Bodo sometime before that.

The Bodo group includes a widely dispersed group of languages, and
seems almost certainly to represent the language that was once spoken
generally in the middle and perhaps upper reaches of the Brahmaputra valley.
It includes today Kachari or Mech on both sides of the river in Goalpara
District, Demesa Kachari in the Cachar Hills, Lalung east of Gauhati, and

1 Shafbr, Robert. 'Classification of the Sino-Tibetan Languages, Word, XI (1956), 94-111.

80 GARO GRAMMAR

Tripura well to the South in the state of Tripura. Though widely dispersed,
these languages or dialects are said to be largely mutually intelligible. The
members of the Koch group are also quite scattered but are found mostly to
the west of the Bodo group, though there is considerable overlap. It includes
apparently some almost, if not completely extinct languages of Cooch Behar,
Rabha which is found to the north of the Garo Hills, and 'Pani' Koch, a
small group to the west of the Garo Hills, which is divided into several
divisions, including Tintikia and Wanang. The Koch group also includes
Atong, which is spoken by a group actually living in the Garo Hills, and
generally reckoned both by themselves and other Garos to be Garos, but
whose language is not mutually intelligible with Garo proper. Ruga, another
divergent * Garo * dialect would alsoappear to be a member of the Koch group,
though it, like Atong to a lesser extent, has been heavily influenced by Garo
during the past generations, and has adopted a great many Garo words.

The Garo group, other than Atong and Ruga, consists of the dialects
spoken in the single dialect area of the Garo Hills and the edges of some of
the bordering districts. The greatest division within this area is between
Abeng (or Am'beng) spoken in approximately the western third of the
district, and what may be called Achik, spoken elsewhere, except for those
southern areas where Atong and Ruga are spoken. (Achik is actually a term
by which all Garos including Abengs refer to themselves, an ethnic term, but
it is sometimes used both by Garos and others when it is necessary to refer
to a 'non-Abeng* or 'non-Atong'.) Abeng and Achik are different enough
from each other so that their speakers sometimes misunderstand each other
when discussing subtitle or complex matters, though they have no difficulty in
everyday affairs, and with patience can make anything clear. Achik is the
language that has gotten into the books, the language of the earlier grammars,
and the language that it taught in the schools. The result is that Abeng now
has a somewhat rustic connotation, and non-Abengs sometimes chuckle at its
idiomatic peculiarities and rather more exaggerated intonation. Abeng is more
or less unified within itself, though by no means completely, and in some
areas at least people maintain , that they can recognize dialect differences
between their own village and others a mile or two away. Several sub-
divisions of the Achik, or eastern dialect are recognized : Matchi and Dual,
spoken in the center of the Hills, and along the upper Simsang (Someswari)
river, which in some ways approximates Abeng, Chisak to the north, and Awe
or Akawe (meaning literally 'plains') still further to the north, where the
hills join the plains of the Brahmaputra valley. These last two groups are
very similar to each other, and since people from this area formed the major
part of the early settlement in Tura, it is also the language spoken in Tura,
though this administrative center of the Garo Hills District is surrounded by
Abeng-speaking villages. This dialect, Chisak or Awe, is also the dialect
described in this Grammar.

Finally there are some people who call themselves and their language

APPENDIX 81

'Matabeng* or 'Matjanchi.' They immediately qualify this title by saying that
they are not quite Abeng and not quite Matchi, though to me their dialect
sounds considerably closer to Abeng than to most Achik dialects. They live
appropriately in the region between the Matchi and the true Abengs. There
are also the two groups Gara and Ganching, often bracketed together even
by themselves as * Gara-Ganching,* in the south border just west of the Atong.
Their language shows a few features similar to Atong or Koch, and possibly
is another of that group. If so, however, their language has been extraordi-
narily heavily influenced by Garo, and many of the people in that area now
speak a language not greatly different from Achik.

Burling, Robbins. 1961. A Garo Grammar.
Poona: Deccan College.